Chris has two weeks to get a ruthless mob boss his money, or the kid is going to be shipped back to them in plastic sacks. Here, then, is the bastard son of Ocean’s Eleven and The Fast and Furious, dumped in Central America and passed through a noise gate set to ‘dumb’. Every caper needs a crew, and Chris recruits his from an exhaustively cross-referenced database of bandits, privateers and cravat-wearing cabin boys. All the old standards are accounted for in a breezy montage: the ship’s cook, the itchy trigger and the nervous sidekick, all rounded off by dead-weight Andy, who returns once more for a dose of brotherly peril.

There is a lot going on in Contraband, a light-footed thriller that relies – not entirely unsuccessfully – on enthusiasm to overcome its intellectual deficiencies. The mission is a simple one: Chris and his team will hitch a boat to Panama, before loading a container with counterfeit dollar bills and sailing it back to America like it was 1989. All good and foolproof, except for the pompous steamboat captain standing in their way. Even before they’ve left dock, Captain JK Simmons is seen striding about like a quartermaster missing his wheel; a comedy Marko Ramius, all a flutter at discovering his crew is made up entirely of battle-hardened drug runners. With such a keen eye for detail, it’s a wonder he overlooked the 6ft hole they’d been blowtorching in his kitchen wall. Perhaps Tim Curry was unavailable for filming.

Back home, another problem begins to manifest itself. Chris’ wife is a pretty sort, the kind of helpless eye candy that films depend on for their eleventh-hour drama. As the mob closes in on her family, a series of inexplicable plot twists emerge, each further evidence of the film’s nonsensical reasoning. Betrayals of the kind depicted rarely make sense. Indeed, they are uniformly counterproductive. As a consequence, our reprobate gang move swiftly through plans A, B and C, by way of broken promises, double-crosses and a standoff with some boilerplate Mexican redshirts. Eventually, you’re forced to conclude Contraband is more interested in manufactured jeopardy than it is helping anyone get where they’re going.

The story of how a peaceful family man is pulled back into a life of crime is by now as much of a parody as the ’7 days until retirement’ trope. That Contraband is enjoyable at all is down to Baltasar Kormákur, whose remake of the Icelandic film ‘Reykjavik-Rotterdam’ is well captured and energetic even at its most ridiculous. Mark Wahlberg continues to be a disappointing Dwayne Johnson understudy, but even he finds the right grunting note for his la-de-da encounters with Ben Foster and Giovanni Ribisi, both of whom are substantially better than their co-stars or material. Few films manage to ever eschew outdated gender roles, fewer still as dumb as this one, so it’s little surprise to find Kate Beckinsale is relegated to The Housewife; to be attractive and meaningfully developed would simply be too much for one script to bear. She’s a plot coupon, if you will, passed among lesser men on their way to nowhere in particular, loudly.

As a thriller, this is a not-so elaborate game of cat and mouse, played in the wake of a successful bank heist. Car 1 and Car 2 are both stuck on the interstate, in a queue stretching back from a police checkpoint. In the first car, we have Marek, Arielle, Losada and Evers: four armed robbers with a million dollars apiece. The second, a family on their way to an idylic camping trip. One of these cars is not like the other, and that roadblock isn’t going to clear itself. The solution to the already obvious problem comes at a nearby gas station, where the wisdom of covertly swapping luggage comes a distant second to the hows: a cunning melange of sweat, tank tops, and Diora Baird. Consider for a moment the stylistic implications of having the camera shoot up at her from the trunk of a car.

With the loot firmly stashed aboard the second vehicle, the games can begin. Within minutes, the two cars are separated. Our bank robbers, for whom this comes as a complete surprise, quickly descend into the kind of bitter infighting that surely foreshadows a more fundamental split yet to come. Losada is the group’s token wildcard, played with headless zeal by Lost’s Harold Perrineau – a man for whom every job is a fresh opportunity to shout “Ma boy!” into the crisp night air. Such personality traits are called upon more than once here, be it in the aftermath of a botched smash-and-grab at a motel, or the aforementioned treachery that would give lesser men cause to make crude reference to unloading in Diora Baird’s face.

Transit does a fair impersonation of an ‘edgy’ thriller – witness the heavily saturated colour palette and a weakness for syncing cuts to a soundtrack pushed far too high in the mix. To the well inebriated, such a show might be enough to forgive a screenplay wholly reliant on its locations being no more than two minutes from one another; rural Louisiana apparently consisting of a river, a road and a forest, with a clear line of sight between all three. If no woodland chase ends in anyone tripping up, it’s only because the film doesn’t need them to. Even perfect getaways aren’t enough in a world of instant capture and stupefying odds. Should you find help, the help will be killed. Should you split up, you will be found. Should you find water, it will be infested with crocodiles. For all its aspirations to the middle, the closest thing Transit has to a rival is David Carradine’s memorable swansong, Dinocroc vs. Supergator. “Dino-mite, croc-tastic!”, puns Entertainment Weekly.

A theme I often return to is that of the likeable actor: the Tom Hanks types, for whom failure should forever be a road less travelled. To that list, I now add Diora Baird. There is a sadness to her performances that I can ignore no longer. While she continues to gamely subscribe to directors asking her to wear as little as possible, you have to believe she dreamt of more than Stan Helsing. She’s a little like Anna Farris in that sense, only with more awareness of her condition. I want to save her, I suppose. Save her, if not from herself, then from the crocodile-infested, direct-to-video waters she seems condemned to navigate until 35, topless and alone.

Less forgivable are the leaps required to make Like Crazy function at all. The whole thing becomes redundant once you acknowledge Anna would simply have returned to the UK at the end of her visa. I understand that films sustain themselves on such contrivances, but the reality is so obvious as to be fatally distracting. She could have come back to America within two months. No drama, no false dilemma. Only stupidity or entitlement would have her believe the rules don’t apply, and which is worse? Even if we accept the ridiculous artifice, a solution was always at hand: Jacob could have travelled to her instead. Except not. See, he’s a carpenter and there’s just no market for wooden furniture in England – that backwards land of crumpets atop stony thrones.

For much of the film, these two love-struck teenagers are arbitrarily kept apart. As such, Like Crazy is largely a series of missed connections and weary answer phone messages. It does get the small things right: how good intentions are lost to pretty distractions, or the way even we coldly ignore even the most pleading of messages when it suits. As to the question of how exactly one navigate affairs of the heart from 5000 miles away: you don’t. Not really. There is always someone left behind, it’s just the film can’t decide who. When Anna and Jacob start dating, she is plainly infatuated. It is her who asks him out, just as she’s the one to convince them that breaking her visa was the only sensible thing to do. When her ruse finally does catch up to her, Anna is the one crying. They share a truthful moment beneath the covers, but Jacob remains disengaged.

On either side of the Atlantic, however, Anna more readily moves on. While Jacob does begin dating a pretty co-worker (Jennifer Lawrence), he never lets her in. In comparison, Anna proves so bewitching to her new partner that he soon proposes in front of her delighted parents. Throughout their separate lives, Anna and Jacob remain in contact. When their loved ones inevitably find out, there is no particular struggle or upset. People come, people go; I’m not sure anyone cares. They drift in and out of one another’s lives without consequence. I dare say that might represent a refreshing break from the genre’s usual melodramatic conventions, but at least such outbursts demonstrate some appreciably level of emotional investment.

Director Drake Doremus staffs his autobiographical film with wonderful actors, even for parts that offer little. Jennifer Lawrence is a carefree, two dimensional party girl, whose interests consist solely of strutting around a palatial loft in panties and Jacob’s buttoned-up shirt. Anna’s luvvy parents (Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead), meanwhile, are so busy consoling themselves with bourgeois wines that they fail to register their daughter’s ugly, narcissistic stupor. The young couple themselves are clearly happier apart, and only some misguided sense of fate continues to bring them back together. Were the implications of their respective infidelities really so vague as to necessitate the lingering, symbolic break of their friendship bracelet? I suppose Like Crazy never was one to let the unnecessary get in the way. With every occasion it wrenches these characters from their happy, contented lives, it only grows more apparent how little reason it has to do so.

The setup is brief, if comical. How an American agent dies is a lesson in calamity and the schoolboy error of checking your phone while trying to steal the dossier. With the revelation that it contains stolen codes to Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the motive for Simon Pegg breaking Ethan Hunt from jail becomes clear. As ever, impossible missions require no less than improbable gadgets: the sort allows a moustachioed Cruise to mince through the Kremlin undetected, shielded behind a portable invisible wall. Unlike last year’s similarly Bloc-obsessed Salt, Mission Impossible fully embraces its absurdity. Every time they have Pegg giddily unfurl a new gadget from his briefcase, it’s the filmmakers asking us to come play in their booby-trapped, 150 million dollar sandpit.

The reasons why one scales the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai are irrelevant in the face of what another business likes to call the money shot: a vertigo-inducing, IMAX-befitting, death defying and implausibly athletic climax, blown on the tallest structure known to man. Even so, when the camera swoops out through an exposed panel for the first time, you do not see fear. Ethan Hunt is climbing to the 130th floor, and all that stands between him and a 2,000 ft drop are some fancy suction cups; when he loses one, you can even drop the plural. There’s a sandstorm too, which is something you’d expect from The Truman Show, when its creator threw all the weather he could at a man and his sail boat. Not many leads would embrace such an arduous task. For Tom Cruise, it is simply home.

Director Brad Bird is best known for Pixar’s The Incredibles, which is about the perfect proving ground for all that transpires in Ghost Protocol. We are continually blinded by absurdist pieces of choreography that delight as much as they defy physics and sense. What holds it together – just – is the core of Cruise and Pegg, who spark ably and with wit not as far removed from Pegg’s days in North London as you might think. Of the wider cast, only Paula Patton is appreciably short-changed. Having gone to great lengths to establish her as a determined, capable agent, the film promptly undermines her character by cajoling her into mounting a clumsy seduction that merely reinforces the perception of women being useful only as sex objects. Anil Kapoor, who is in danger of becoming the Indian Stellan Skarsgård, is likewise reduced to the lecherous Neanderthal with a hard-on.

Whether such a flaw is anything more than business as usual for Hollywood is likely a question beyond the film’s limited remit. The fourth instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise is well-executed, brainless thoroughfare, of the type that summers used to be built on before the advent of the simply brainless. It lacks a central performance with the credibility of a Philip Seymour Hoffman, and lazily fumbles with a finale comparable to some never-ending automotive platformer. Taken strictly as a blockbuster, however, it’s hard to find real fault. The film is bright and humorous, not over long or weighed down by lumpy exposition. Ghost Protocol is the franchise distilled, crafted for your maximum guilty pleasure and holler. This time, it is us who wouldn’t have it any other way.

It is often said that when God closes a door, he opens a window. If that’s the case, then he gave Katherine terminal cancer and Benjamin a zoo. Benjamin Mee had been in mourning for six months, with only a fridge full of donated lasagne to show for it. Left alone to care for his two children, we meet him sometime after the pain has faded, but long before anything has started to make sense. Given the circumstances, you can imagine how a certain adventure might appeal; how real that it should come from an estate agent. J.B. Smoove is a little like Parker from Thunderbirds, only without the unfortunate Driving Miss Daisy connotations. In a field just outside Los Angeles (being a close relation to Plymouth, England), he introduces his new client to a zoo in disrepair, staffed by volunteers without the means to shore it up.

As you might expect, friends and family are quick to share their concerns. After all, buying a zoo is an expensive way to ease your grief. Thomas Hayden Church plays Duncan, his brother. They look alike, and share a kinship that defies their other differences. Benjamin is a little idealistic, while Duncan thinks more practically. The real Benjamin once wrote an article about the taboo attraction to widowhood: how women seemed drawn to him in a way they hadn’t before. Married friends would suddenly find reason to pop-by. Single parents would offer themselves to him at the school gates. “Work through the stages of grief,” Duncan tells him “but stop just short of a zebra”. Well, he didn’t say anything about a jaguar, did he?

The path to fulfilment is paved with small, mostly familiar dramas. As stories go, We Bought a Zoo is far more cloying than many will appreciate. Nonetheless, rich talent courses through its gooey veins, even if Patrick Fugit’s mute appearance serves no particular purpose other than to remind us of the dozen years since Almost Famous. Benjamin’s two children are appealing enough, with Maggie Elizabeth Jones in particular going some way to humanising a story so frequently overcome with schmaltz. Likewise, Scarlett Johansson – surely the world’s most unlikely zookeeper – displays a rare confidence in abilities that lie someway above her chest. Rven auxiliary characters, from the drunken carpenter to the punctilious inspector, are cast to the film’s benefit. Hayden Church’s own ironic contributions, of course, go entirely without saying.

The writing can be a little blunt (“Our adventure is. only. just. beginning”), for this is the acclaimed director in unusually crowd pleasing mood. Forget Matt Damon as the loving father just trying to make it work. Forget about his wife, still lingering on. If you want to know why this is still a Cameron Crowe movie at heart, then look to Elle Fanning, who remains so effortlessly beguiling that it’s a shame she has to grow up at all. She plays a 12-year-old girl who knows all about Bob Dylan, which is a given when you consider her voice belongs to a guy you cut his teeth writing for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. Now positively middle-aged, Crowe is a screenwriter compelled to channel those zeitgeist experiences into the body of a blonde girl in love with a boy. Of course she loves Bob Dylan. She could probably give you the skinny on every Wilburys 7″ if you asked.

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of believing the fight for gay equality is over. Forty years on from its first appearance in the Supreme Court, the issues surrounding homosexuality – and, indeed, the wider LGBT community – might have faded, but they have not disappeared. Today, we find ourselves distracted by debates on marriage and military service, yet they remain wholly political problems that require only a signature to solve. The real struggles lie within our own communities, where homosexuality is often still accepted only in a theoretical sense. How sad that a supposedly enlightened society still takes “…I just don’t want to see it” to be a point of tolerance, not bigotry.

Only Russell’s close friends know of his sexuality, and even then it goes without comment. He doesn’t need a broken legislature to be forced into a public life of near-asexuality. Gay nightclubs flourish, yet what goes on there is rarely discussed with the same frankness allowed their straight counterparts. When some sexualities are more equal than others, it gives rise to the kind of inconsistencies that see men like Russell listening to colleagues boasting about how many fingers they can get inside a girl, when they wouldn’t be offered the same courtesy in return. At least the more overt discriminations of the 70s and 80s offered some manifest injustice to rally against. Now there is only acquiescence.

Navigating such a world comes with the usual social gatherings at which to mingle, or the occasion to exchange pleasantries at a Goddaughter’s birthday party. As happy as they are, such occasions are a lie. Only at night, under cover of driving beats propelling darkened rooms, can Richard truly shed the expectations of others; the pervasive belief that the likes of Glen are unseemly and taboo. They meet, not entirely by chance, in a bathroom stall. As morning breaks, they drink tea in Russell’s bedroom. Glen pulls a small tape recorder from his bag and asks Russell to recall their night together. Click. Silence. Even here, open dialogue seems like a foreign tongue. Richard’s shame, acquired through osmosis, is now inescapable.

An affair in a weekend, in which a fledgling couple talk about their feelings, masked in the easy language of promiscuity. The stereotypes of the closeted and the proud are just that, but they grow into a mature, perceptive exploration of intimacy as practiced by an entire generation. Whenever there is talk of a future together, the pair retreat into arguments and posturing. Glen, once so vocal in his espousal of an open lifestyle, proves stubborn and defensive; Russell, more open to change. “When you first sleep with someone you don’t know, you become a blank canvas upon which you project what you want to be”. A line as true as any, theirs is a romance that attempts to bridge the gap that emerges once the pretence is over. In doing so, it is revealed as being that of any other. Weekend is not a gay film, but a truthful one.

By the time a local hairdresser intervenes, it has become obvious that Cyril’s journey has less to do with the bike than the world his father abandoned it to. Samantha (Cecile De France) – more glamorous than the Dardenne brothers would usually allow – first encounters Cyril at the doctor’s office, where the Scrappy Doo youngster crashes into her with all the force his blind kineticism will allow. Later, having taken to bed in the manner of a child in protest, Cyril emerges to find her at his door, precious bike in tow. The only wrinkle is how it got there in the first place. Surely his father could not have been responsible? “They must have stolen it and sold it back to you!” he insists, pointing a determined scowl toward the young children from town. All around him, adult eyebrows are raised. They, like us, suspect an altogether darker tale of neglect and woe.

In a bid to prove his father’s virtue, Cyril conducts a door-to-door search of the smokestack Belgian town. An ad in the shopkeeper’s window promises a lead: the address of a local cafe, affixed to the for-sale notice of a now-familiar bicycle. Samantha watches her young friend gain entry with the kind of gymnastics that come so readily to the young and fearless. The owner – startled by the freckled visitor hanging perilously from his guttering – is less impressed and, not for the first time, we sense impending disappointment. Father and son are reacquainted at a distance, as if one were a featherweight swinging helplessly at the air beneath the other’s outstretched glove. The restaurant is full he says; don’t call him, he’ll call you. These are the excuses of a man who does not wish to see his son, much less care for him. Samantha once warned Cyril of the difference between “agreeing to see you and wanting to see you”, and now implores his father to be honest. The heavy door swings shut. “Don’t try and see me again”.

The senseless manner in which a father can discard of his son is the precursor to a tour d’ bastard youth: the flailing of the quietly abused, passed between foster homes in search of elusive permanence. Cyril makes a habit of biting, which leads a local gang to christen him ‘Pitbull’. Their chieftain is of the sort you might find in summer forests, roaming with leather jackets and make-believe arsenals. His is a sad example, enticing all the while to a boy who clings so desperately to even the most foolish of camaraderie. The end game of their short con arrives too soon for catharsis or impact, but does allow the film its one lasting impression – that of a scared kid, frightened and alone; trembling baseball bat extending out from the shadows.

The Kid With a Bike is a film that chronicles the many disappointments of youth, and Cyril has had more than most. Perhaps that bike is a metaphor for the torrid waves of foster care. Perhaps it is simply a bike. Its true function – and that of the characters who find it – is difficult to care about when the film refuses to engage in anything beside flaccid observation. There is no depth to these characters and their vague (presumably absent) motivations. Set aside pretention, and you are left merely with an ambitious episode of Byker Grove, from which the film has seemingly also borrowed its cinematography. Distance and naturalism are powerful tools, but the Dardennes seem intent on using ‘realism’ only as cover for lazy, inconsequential filmmaking.

In the context of a film whose veracity is questionable, the selection process for McCain’s running mate is shown to have been conducted without regard for impression, sanity or actuary tables. It was only having passed on a raft of more traditional candidates that his selection committee even came upon the little-known governor from Alaska. It’s there we find that strategist, face lined from years of venal campaigning, hunched over his laptop. In Sarah Palin, he believed they had found everything the Republican party needed. Of course, having spent the preceding decade pushing the Overton window so far to the right that only the most backward of conservatives could possibly excite the base, perhaps she was simply what they deserved.

What scuppered John McCain was his rush to anoint a woman he knew little about, and didn’t even want. His own preference was for Joe Lieberman, the blue-dog senator whose continued affiliation with the Democratic party seems predicated almost entirely on a good parking space. All the same, word from the party elders was clear: a split convention was at risk, if not the future of conservatism itself. They insisted upon instead upon a ‘game changer’, and preferably a female one. Having found one, they didn’t pause to ask whether Palin knew the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq. In the midst of the biggest financial crisis in recent memory, no one knew if she could even name the Federal Reserve. None of it seemed to matter. All they cared about was whether or not she would tow the party line on the truly pressing issues: those of abortion, and stem cell research; of godless homosexuality. Palin nodded quietly, as she was prone to do whenever she was faced with a question she didn’t understand, of which there were many. So many, in fact, that she was kept away from the press, to the farcical extent that even Fox News began to wonder what had become of her. When news broke of her being unable to name what newspaper she read in an interview with ABC’s Katie Couric, they wondered no more.

Game Change captures a Hindenburg campaign so overburdened with disaster that McCain’s own innumerable problems are largely ignored. The focus remains on Palin, for whom the days of wagging her tail at the campaign’s behest seemed a distant memory. Now there was only casual disinterest. Preparation for her debate with Joe Biden was mired by what many suspected were the beginnings of a nervous breakdown. Sessions would often be cut short as she stared vacantly into the distance, motionless, as though primitive circuitry had shorted-out. Her only response to the mountains of facts and political minutia she was expected to learn was to deploy a quite undecipherable system of cue cards, stacked in thick bundles across her dining table. When, at last, the campaign finally convinced “the greatest actress in American politics” to simply rote learn a few key answers, they seemed relieved. They shouldn’t have.

Those of a particular inclination will enjoy watching the Straight Talk Express continue its wretched slide into ruin, for Game Change is nothing if not a slick retelling of events. What it lacks are the teeth to put paid to the great myth of John McCain, which, even now, goes largely unchallenged – the notion that his journey down the river of gutter politics is somehow wholly reconcilable with this image of an honourable man. What honour is there in pandering to the bigoted, to the unthinking, to the racist and secessionist? The scenes that came to define the campaign were not, as the film suggests, simply the work of overexcited crowds. Rather, they represented the concerted efforts of a Republican party trying to define their opponent as a dangerous insurgent; the well-spoken Negro heading straight up Pennsylvania Avenue. That the film somehow ends on the suggestion that those same cowardly architects were the ones defending his honour is as breathtaking as it is patently untrue.

There are but two moments of note. In the first, Palin watches TV, helpless at her every mannerism being torn to shreds on prime time. It is an uncomfortable reminder, if any were needed, that all attacks have their targets, and sometimes those targets have to watch Saturday Night Live along with everyone else. The other comes at a campaign rally, in which the briefest flicker of horror emerges at what has been unleashed; Republican staffers looking out at a frenzied crowd chanting their unthinking idol; one of us, they screamed, so homely her $150,000 wardrobe. When the ugly truth of Sarah ‘Barracuda’ Palin is captured, so are the dire implications of her rise demonstrated. If only there was more of it. As it stands, you may not be able to put lipstick on a pig, but you can apparently apply it to a loathsome campaign of cynicism, nepotism, and craven triangulation.

“Adult men don’t babysit things”, he huffs, like he has no idea what’s coming. Films have often relied on their characters naiveté for plot development, and The Sitter is no different. What sets it apart is its disinterest in using that to any notable end. Having heard the setup – a young college dropout left in charge of three mischievous kids for the night -you’d be forgiven for expecting a crude junket like that of The Hangover. They do share several traits, coked-out drug dealers and midtown madness amongst them. What it lacks, however, is that film’s camaraderie and energy. Too bad. Even the lamest jokes can be forgiven when delivered with enough chutzpah, and The Sitter has its share of stinkers.

Jonah Hill stars as Noah. Having spent his summer indulging a diet of cheetos and General Hospital, he finds himself in need of a job. And not just any job, for office work wouldn’t even begin to provide the unlikely hijinks necessary for such a comedy. For that, what’s required is exposure to the incontinent young: those fiery pre-teens who consider the world their urinal and splatter-paint shitting bowl. All the better when Mom has a tight dress and a penchant for slowly unwrapping bananas. You know, like a penis.

The events of The Hangover were driven by the character’s increasingly desperate quest to get back in time for a wedding. Here, the honeypot is Marisa’s vagina, which could yet be a New York mirage; ever was it thus for the misshapen and spotty. Her bargain with Noah for a delivery of coke in exchange for sex (“Like, full. on. vaginal. sex”) is responsible for all that transpires, from the appearance of a scatty and surely contractually-obliged Sam Rockwell, to a rendezvous with the impossibly attainable Roxanne. She, as is often the case, once offered the potential for real substantive development, only to be revealed as another tiresome perfect-but-not-until-he-realises-it girl next door.

Where once an escaped tiger led affairs astray, now are three children. The youngest, Blithe, is a beauty pageant darling with all the cutthroat ambition and none of the aspirations for world peace. Slater is introduced by way of the medications he needs to control his severe anxiety, in a barely-disguised prophecy that is surely unlikely to be of consequence later on. And then there’s Rodrigo, the pyromaniac. I’m not necessarily suggesting he’s the family’s adopted Mexican terrorist, only that he has an extensive collection of candy bombs in his pyjama pants. He blows up a whole bunch of toilets with them, in a recurring joke we’re presumably meant to find funnier with each subsequent airing. Kid’s gonna cut you, cabrón.

In any event, while the ingredients are there to fashion a passable Friday night entertainment, the result is considerably less than the sum of its parts. Jonah Hill is arguably the worst of all. His problem is less what his performance is than what it isn’t. Or, to put it another way, this isn’t Moneyball. Everything he does in The Sitter is representative of his entire body of work, with just that one, Academy Award winning exception. Where once he was erudite and lucid thanks to the words of Aaron Sorkin, here he’s back to being the fat kid with a fro’. He looks tired, like maybe he’d been reading the Moneyball script between takes and couldn’t quite reconcile the distance between the two. Poor guy. From a world of Billy Beane and grand sports diatribes, into this: a German shelf toilet of queens, roller-skates and dried faecal matter for your study and consideration.

Carnage has two married couples do what married couples so rarely do outside the movies. They argue with about this, they argue about that, and then they argue with one another about some other detail, only tangentially related to the first. Most strangers are far too polite for such cascading hostilities, but they have long served as the lifeblood of one-room plays – that reserved exterior, sitting atop a reservoir of unbridled nastiness. At least Carnage has fun with its genre limitations. Half the enjoyment comes from watching it twist and turn itself to keep characters together who really ought to be apart. Elevator doors open, elevator doors close. Coffees are drunk, meals served. How many times can these people put on their coats to leave, only to sit back down again? I lost count.

Penelope and Michael are the picture of middle-class hospitality, taking considerably more pleasure in serving slices of homemade cobbler than their guests do in eating it. We recognise their faces of horror and obligation as second helpings find their way onto the plates. Such duality is a constant. No matter what the topic of discussion, be it plumbing fixtures or the minefield of modern parenting, there is a struggle between civility and entrenchment, for the two cannot co-exist. A man like Alan Cowan seems determined to force the issue, just barely hiding his contempt for the whole charade. On the subject of a meeting between their two sons, “ours is a maniac. If you hope he’ll suddenly and spontaneously get all apologetic, you’re dreaming.”

There’s a recurring bit about bad manners brought on by constant phone interruptions, followed by a big to-do over projectile vomiting. How we get from A to B isn’t really clear, and gets no clearer on reflection. I find it helpful to consider the film an extended drama school exercise, in which a whistle blows every 15 minutes to signal it time to swap roles. It is the only logical explanation for how alliances can shift so suddenly, with nothing more than a single malt between jumps. Michael is first peacemaker, then incredulous divorcee. Alan moves fluidly from belligerence to armchair philosopher, while Penelope does the opposite and then back again. How artificial it all feels; a keen reminding of how Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunset’ made such artifices redundant.

At times, even competency seems elusive. Jodie Foster engages us with barbs thrown through toothy smiles, until she morphs into the pearl necklace dictator of the Upper East Side, shackled to a man newly emboldened by traditionalism long hidden beneath a woollen sweater. And what of Kate Winslet, whose uncharacteristically appalling display of drunk buffoonery calls into question every statuette that ever came her way? Christopher Waltz is right to look utterly mortified.

Like the worst theatre translations, Carnage is far too self-involved for its own good; too in love with its structural tricks to recognise the hollowness therein. I’m reliably informed such an arrangement makes for an involving production on stage, but this screenplay by Polanski and Yasmina Reza is sorely lacking in credible drama. That individual moments are suggestive of something more only makes it worse. As Winslet’s character eventually finds the self-awareness to conclude, “Should we wrap this up? This is getting to be, like, who cares?”